Medieval Mysticism: Superabundance of Divine Grace
Last year, on May 10, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI sanctified Hildegard of Bingen and thus announced that she belonged among those individuals who were graced by God already here in life. For him, and now for all Catholics, Hildegard was deeply blessed by God. After hundreds of years after her death in 1179, the evidence has reached critical mass that she was a prophet, that is, God’s mouthpiece, a human individual who received divine inspiration and experienced extraordinary visions and revelations. It is seems amazing—perhaps a miracle—that a medieval mystic could be sainted in the twenty-first century. Are we not living in a highly technologized world, determined by rationality and critical thinking, in a secular society that does not believe in miracles or mysticism? Apparently not, and this both in a negative and a positive sense because the absence of rationality, for instance, continues to cause massive killings and murder all over the world, it provokes endless wars, and brings about huge suffering for humankind. But rationality and technology are not necessarily the absolute yardsticks, not even in areas such as medicine.
As the neurosurgeon Allan J. Hamilton has recently pointed out, medical operations and the actual healing process operate much better and much more effectively if the patient displays hope, even faith, is surrounded by family members, and trusts his or her physician/surgeon. Hamilton goes so far as to refer strongly to a belief in God as a truly magical vehicle for healing. Science and religion are not enemies, on the contrary, and in this regard we do not have to limit ourselves to a Christian perspective.1 This is a universal, human experience, connecting us today with our medieval forbears or alerts us to the significance of their messages. Those who are interested in mystical experiences today or are granted them personally prove to be avatars of a fairly large group of amazing people in the Middle Ages. In other words, we might go so far as to say that the past is catching up with us in the postmodern era in a quite uncanny fashion because divine grace, however we might define it, is not bound by human time and conditions. Hence, learning from the past might provide us with insights into our own future as spiritual beings.
Medieval mystics such as Hildegard were most amazing witnesses to extraordinary experiences that we normally associate only with the prophets of the Old Testament, and perhaps with Christ Himself. Modern research has discovered their texts already several decades ago, and yet their witness accounts remain mysterious, startling, highly provocative, difficult to understand, or even to accept. In this paper I want to try the impossible, following in the footsteps of many other scholars of mysticism,2 and explore the phenomenon itself although the visions described by the mystics represent, in essence, a human impossibility, reflecting the apophatic, and the ineffable, poorly translatable into human language.
The German mystic Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260-1328) was probably the most powerful and trenchant contributor to the discourse on mystical experiences, even if the debate is still open whether he was a philosopher, a theologian, or a mystic, or all three things combined.3 For him it was virtually impossible to talk about God not because he could not grasp Him, but because human language proved to be too limited to come to terms with His divinity: “neither the skills of all creatures, nor your own wisdom nor the whole extent of your knowledge can bring yo to the point that you have a divine knowledge of God. If you wish to know God in a divine manner, then your knowing must become a pure unknowing, a forgetting of yourself and of all creatures.”4 Nevertheless, the mystic-philosopher strove very hard to come to terms with what God might be: “he is everywhere and is everywhere complete. He is everywhere on account of his infinity, and is everywhere complete on account of his simplicity. Only God flows into all things, their very essences . . . God is in the innermost part of each and every thing, only in its innermost part, and he alone is one.”5 While Eckhart developed most famously something we would call “negative theology” today, many of his predecessors and successors, especially women following Hildegard and others pursuing their own quest for God, such as Marguerite de Porète, Catherine of Siena, or Bridget of Sweden, powerfully resorted to a wide range of textual genres and managed thereby to formulate in stunning terms what their visions had meant for them.
As all mystics consistently formulated, the sudden arrival of God’s divine grace in the life of an ordinary human being proved to be a deep shock and was always hard to handle for them, whether female or male. As Hildegard formulates in the first vision of the second part of her Scivias: “And I, a human being, neither ablaze with the strength of strong lions nor learned in their exhalations, remaining in the fragility of the weaker rib [woman], but filled with mystical inspiration, saw a shining fire, unfathomable, inextinguishable, fully alive and existing full of life; with a flame the color of the air, brightly burning in the gentle breeze, and as inseparable from the shining fire as a human being is inseparable from his inner organs.”6 She had heard voices and had seen images, and she was in an ecstatic stage of an extraordinary kind which only mystics seem to be capable of experiencing.
Of course, modern readers might easily be tempted to dismiss such accounts as imaginary or as reflections of a hysterical mind, as was still common in the earlier part of the twentieth century. But such short-sighted ‘rational’ responses completely mistake her visions and measure them with scientific criteria, as if images or imagination, real or not, had anything to do with material conditions. No astronomer, for instance, here disregarding personal beliefs, would ever be able to fathom the truth of Hildegard’s comments, but the same would apply to the effort to grasp scientifically what makes Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or John Milton’s Messiah to masterpieces of all times, beyond all measures and scientific proof. It would be like asking how an ardent lover could prove that he or she is truly and deeply in love, relying only on molecular-biological and chemo-medical criteria. Hildegard, by contrast, simply revealed an inner secret because it was overflowing in her, and she just could no longer hide it from her contemporaries because her heart or soul were not big enough to hold all that divine Grace all by itself.
Critics might argue that Hildegard’s descriptions of her visions reflect nothing but outpourings of a sick mind, especially when she turns to the cosmic egg: “I saw a huge form, rounded and shadowy, and shaped like an egg, it was pointed at the top, wide in the middle and narrower at the bottom. Its outer layer consisted of an atmosphere of bright fire with a kind of dark membrane beneath it” (89). Such an evaluation, however, would be extremely short-sighted and reveal a blindness to the relevance of spiritual dimensions expressed—how else could it be—in poetic, literary terms. Divine grace requires, to be become comprehensible for human beings, concrete, material language or images, though those immediately threaten to make its experience feel mundane and trite. What we encounter here can also be explained with a reference to the experience of love, equally evanescent and yet extremely relevant and influential in human life.
As the French mystic Marguerite Porète (d. 1310) formulated it, “The one whom God has given understanding of it knows that, and no-one else, for no book contains it, nor can man’s intelligence comprehend it, nor can any creature’s laboring be rewarded by understanding or comprehending it.”7 Many times this mystic demonstrated even a strong sense of lyricism, especially when she correlates the mystical experience with love: “the Soul does not have its fill of divine Love, nor does divine Love have its fill of the Soul, until the Soul is in God and God is in the Soul, and when the Soul is in such a state of divine rest, from God and through God, then she has all her fill” (27). Marguerite outlines in powerful terms how the soul merges with the Godhead in the form of bridal mysticism, a very common motif in the Middle Ages especially pursued by female writers and visionaries.8 After all, most female mystics experienced a form of love in their visions, deeply spiritual, yet they then resorted to the same images and topoi as employed by the contemporary secular writers at the courts. The North German beguine who turned into a nun late in her life, Mechthild of Magdeburg (ca. 1208-1282/97) pursued that technique and literary strategy just as much as the Flemish poet and mystic Hadewijch (13th century).9
As we have learned over the last decades of intense research, the overflowing grace experienced by those mystical writers elevated them to some of the most sophisticated and glorious poets of their time, who demonstrated a superb control of language, rhetoric, and imagery, which was a direct result of their divine inspiration. Probably virtually every artist, composer, or sculptor today would agree with such a statement because human art, if authentic, proves to be a reflection of the divine, while the creator of those art pieces serves as the graced medium. The medieval mystics were empowered to experience that direct exchange very personally, in a revelation, but who is to say that contemporary poets, for instance, would not gain their creativity from a non-material source, from the soul or, more properly, from God Himself.
The English mystic Julian of Norwich (ca. 1343-after 1416) may have the final word in our short reflections on the meaning of superabundance in religious terms, especially because she offered a most beautiful image of this world (a hazelnut) as seen from God’s perspective as well as through the mystic’s lens:
“And in this, he shewed a little thing the quantity of an haselnot, lying in the palme of my hand as me semide, and it was as rounde as any balle. I looked theran with the eye of my understanding, and thought: ‘What may that be?’ And it was answered generally thus: ‘It is all that is made.’ I marvayled how it might laste, for methought it might sodenly have fallen to nought for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding; ‘It lasteth and ever shall, for God loveth it. And so hath all thing being by the love of God.”10
It would be incorrect to claim that mysticism was a phenomenon only of the Middle Ages. It has continued through today, though we tend to be much more critical of any such claims. Modern society now has the asylum available to put away anyone daring to reveal such visions in a serious manner. We do not need to believe in medieval mystics’ statements, if that was ever the case for everyone—some mystics such as Marguerite and Joan of Arc were actually burned at the stake for alleged heresy—but we could also appreciate them with full justification as reflections of the superabundance of the Divine, freely giving Itself to the perceptive and open observer, who thus turns into a mystic. In our time, which increasingly tends toward secularism, it proves to be highly insightful when we consider medieval mysticism once again as a viable and powerful strategy which creates internal enlightenment and blesses the individual in his/her search for the Godhead. The physical dimension is good for this world, but, as the mystics have told us already, there is so much more beyond our material limitations. And who would not want to be blessed by divine grace in all its over- and superabundance?
Notes
1. Allan J. Hamilton, The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with Surgery, the Supernatural, and the Healing Power of Hope (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2008). Although mostly written from an anecdotal perspective, Hamilton has true wisdom to offer from a medical/surgical point of view.
2. The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Julia A. Lamm (Chichester, West Sussex, and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
3. A Companion to Meister Eckhart, ed. Jeremiah M. Hackett. Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition, 36 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013).
4. Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, selected and trans. by Olivier Davies (London: Penguin, 1994), 224; Sermon 25 (w 4, PF 4, DP 59).
5. Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, 1994, 58, Sermon 2 (t.w XXIX).
6. Quoted from Hildegard of Bingen, Selected Writings, trans. with an intro. and notes by Mark Atherton (London: Penguin, 2001), 9.
7. Margaret Porette (alternative spelling), The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. Edmund Colledge, J. C. Marler, and Judith Grant. Notre Dame Texts in Medieval Culture, 6 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 17.
8. Suzanne Kocher, Allegories of Love in Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls. Medieval Woimen: Texts and Contexts, 17 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008).
9. Albrecht Classen, “Binary Oppositions of Self and God in Mechthild von Magdeburg’s Mystical Visions,” Studies in Spirituality 7 (1997): 79-98; id., “The Dialectics of Mystical Love in the Middle Ages: Violence/Pain and Divine Love in the Mystical Visions of Mechthild of Magdeburg and Marguerite Porète,” Studies in Spirituality 20 (2010): 143-60; id., “Die flämische Mystikerin Hadewijch als erotische Liebesdichterin,” Studies in Spirituality 12 (2002): 23-42.
10. The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park: PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 139, 5th chapter.
